The Solar Panel experiment begins

As part of the ‘how to save money at home’ videos and blog updates I’ve started for the bigger part of this.  I’vejumped in head first and bought some solar products which has came to close enough to £600.

The idea is I can’t afford to buy a solar panel kit for the house, at well over £10,000 for a full solar system this is just not possible at the moment so I’m looking at various other ways to reduce our electric bill for as little as possible.

With cost cutting in mind rather than spending 10k and over I thought £600 was a much better option for me.  I’ve bought:

1 x 60W Monocrystalline Solar Panel @ £225.00

1 x 5Mt Extension cable             @ £  8.99

1 x 7amp Charge Controller          @ £ 15.00

1 x 110ah Deep cycle leisure battery@ £ 94.98

1 x 2000W Pure Sign Wave Inverter   @ £189.00

To add to the above I’ve also bought a solar panel stand so I should be able to direct the solar panel at direct sunlight in order to get the best charge.

With the above I’ll be able to make my own ‘Solar Energy Charging Station’.  This charging station will, after setting up / experiments run in to the kitchen were you will find some standard plug sockets.  The sockets of course will be getting their energy / power from the solar panel which will live it’s long life in the garden.

I’m hoping that after trying various methods I will be able to run a few house hold products from the solar panels and hopefully cut the cost of my electric bill even further.

I of course don’t expect to save £600 a year but I’m hoping that with various other cost / energy saving products I’ll reduce my electric bill a significant amount which, after a year or two the money saved will have paid for all the devices bought on this journey.

 

Posted on August 2nd, 2011 in Money Saving, Solar Panel Reviews, Solar Power by JP No Comments

Most people put off using Green Energy

It has not been a really big shock to read that people are put of using green energy because of the price but it’s been reported that a large percent of people are interested but knowing the price they don’t bother

At the moment it can cost well in excess of £10,000 to have a solar solution installed in (or rather on) your home.  It’s estimated that having a home solar solution installed would save a bit more than half of your yearly electric bills and of course  cut down the carbon emissions.  It is a great idea for all but the initial outlay of money is beyond the reach of many people.

So what can we do?

As with all technology as the months pass by there are always new advances and of course this is the same with solar panels.  It may take a bit longer but prices should start to drop once different ways, methods, materials are found to work with the solar panels.  Time is the main factor here, if you wait that bit longer you should see the prices fall and the chance to get some panels installed and for you to harness the solar energy will get closer.

What can we do now?

If you keep reading my blog and watch my videos I’m always trying to find the cheapest ways to cut down the eclectic bill.  Apart from changing various things in the house I’ll also be setting up a solar panel ‘charging station’.

The idea behind the charging station is a cheap (under £600) solution to charging various devices and to see just what we can run off this solution.  It’s all about saving money in the longer term not the short term.

Basically if you can’t afford to pay out £10,000 + and want to save money on your electric bill then keep reading and watching for my hints / tips / real examples of saving money at home by using solar energy.

Posted on August 2nd, 2011 in Green Cars, Money Saving by JP No Comments

Wind Turbines Good or Bad

Every other day you read in the news that new ‘wind farms’ are appearing around the UK whether it is on land or out at sea.  There also always seems to be a debate on if this is a good or bad thing.

Many residents around the UK have been opposed to either planed wind farms or wind farms that are already in operation and producing electric.  The problem that always seems to be one of two responses, they are noisy or they spoil the area.

wind turbines

A Typical Wind Farm

The image to the left is a typical wind farm in the UK.  You don’t have to drive far before you see something like this image in your local area.  We have a wind farm less than a mile away from our current house and we have never heard these turbines and nor does it spoil the landscape.
The UK has been adding plenty of offshore wind farms though which does seem to be the more preferred option to wind farms on land.
This year alone has seen a massive 108 offshore wind farms built in the surrounding sea with around 101 being built by the UK.  This is a big step in the right direction to help the UK reduce the overall c02 levels.
With each new wind farm built at sea there is always the question asked on whether it will destroy the wild live in the ocean.  There has been a number of studies and the simple answer is “no it wont”.
There is, of course plenty of disturbance when the wind farms are being built, however only a very short time needs to pass before there is an abundance of wildlife living around the bottom of the wind turbine.  This wildlife is using the wind turbine as a home / shelter and includes many crabs and fish.
The second advantage after built is the restriction of fishing around the farms.  It’s just not possible for trawlers to get close to the turbines and many of the farms also have a restriction on how close smaller boats and recreational anglers can get which in turn gives a ‘safe haven’ to many forms of sea life.
Posted on August 1st, 2011 in Green News, Wind Power by JP No Comments

Solar panels could get better

As we all know Solar panels are being common around the UK whether it is on homes or in the garden.  The current panels do quite a good job at creating electricity but there is hope for improvement.

The clever people are trying out a new structure to the solar panels that forces photons to bounce while going through the panel rather than just ‘going through’.

This bouncing effect means that when light hits the new designs it’s bouncing from one layer to another, each time the light hits a layer it’s producing a small charge of electricity rather than the current process where the light simply hits the layer once, produces a charge and passes through.

This new design could mean that solar panels could be 26% more efficient than solar panels on the market today.

If the new design can be perfected then it would mean that a current 80w solar panel would infact be called a 100w solar panel.  I’m not sure if this would mean a price cut in the cost of solar panels but the material they have been testing the structured layered is less expensive that the current silicon solar cells.

Posted on August 1st, 2011 in Green News by JP No Comments

Saving Money at Home part 3

This is a small update about saving some extra money at home.  This morning while chatting to the wife she was talking about our BT account.  At the moment we have a BT phone line, BT TV and we have BT Internet.

She rang up and has paid for a year in advance and went on to paperless bills which is saving us £4 a month, although not a ‘massive’ saving it all counts.

There are now a few companies offering these kinds of savings and some will even pay you a small amount of money for doing this (I’ve seen a company offering £5 cash back) so it’s worth checking.  I would advise either checking online or ringing up places like your phone/TV/Internet providers, banks, electric / gas providers to see whether they offer any kind of deals.

 

Posted on August 1st, 2011 in Money Saving by JP No Comments

Saving Money at home Part 2

When I last talked about saving money at home I talked about installing the OWL electric monitoring system and did a small video about it.  In this next video I’m talking about how to start and save some money at home using the data I’m collecting from the monitor.

This video I talk about how I’m installing some new plugs that will turn off anything attached to it rather than being on standby all the time.

The plugs I used in the video above were bought from ebay and were basically the cheapest I could find after hunting around for 10 minutes.  They are not a big solution on how to reduce the amount of energy we use through the day but it should slow the amount used through the night as we will no longer have baby monitors on, TV /Wii and my Hard Drive backup device all running on standby.

Morning energy usage

 

This picture shows the amount of electric we are using first thing in the morning.  At the moment with the TV, Wii and various other devices left on / standby throughout the night I’m hoping there should be a slight drop when I first wake up.

I’m not expecting the reading to go much lower and I may have to connect the OWL monitor to the PC and look at the actual night usage of electric to really see if there is any difference.

I’ve installed the plugs so it will be a case of having a check in the morning to see whether anything is different but of course I will report back with any and all findings!

 

Later in the week I will be looking at further ways to try and help reduce the amount of electric we use in the house, without spending a lot of money this is a uphill battle to save money but hopefully the results should, in the long run save some money for me.. and you.

Posted on July 31st, 2011 in Money Saving by JP No Comments

Electric and Solar Cars

I keep coming across news about the solar car ‘World Solar Challenge’ where you enter in a 3000 km race where the car is totally solar powered.

The cars at the moment will never (or at least in my life time) go in to mass production as they are not good enough in anyway but the concept of a solar powered car is something that may start hitting the streets.

At the moment we of course have the fully electric cars such as the Nissan Leaf and of course hybrid cars and it’s getting to the point that most of the main car makers are trying to get in to this market area.  What you don’t see and I really don’t know why is a fully electric car with built in solar panels to charge the batteries.

I know Toyota have the hybrid car the prius and a optional extra is a solar panel roof which will help run the air conditioning unit for the car so the question is why are the ‘all’ electric cars not actually running solar panels to help recharge the batteries?

There seems to be a few cars that do seem to be adopting ‘build in solar panel’ for the car but I would of thought this would of been high on the list for the new green cars.

To me having build in solar panels on all electric cars would make some sense, I would not expect the solar panels to keep the batteries fully charged but surely it would help them to gain a little extra charge.  It should, in theory, give the all electric cars a slightly better range (although depending on solar panel size it might not be very far) but it would also help with charging times and cost by reducing both of these.

Perhaps in the near future when the solar panels and batteries get better they might be a little more common as lets face it, they should go hand in hand!

Posted on July 30th, 2011 in Green Cars by JP No Comments

Saving Money at home – Update

It’s been a few days since I first got / installed the OWL electric monitoring system and it’s been quite interesting although I have bored half my family talking about it!

The system was easy to install ( Saving Money at Home ) and I started collecting data right away.  Tonight I’ve finally got around to installing the software to read the data on the PC and I’ve managed to make some nice fancy pictures for you all to see!

The first picture just shows the usage since it’s been turned on (a few days) so it’s not really that interesting / offer a lot of information.

OWL electric system

Electric Usage

 

So as you can see the graph does not really show to much information at the moment other than we are using electric in the house.. so at least it’s working!

It does start to get more interesting once you go further ‘in to’ te graph and actually look at a full days use of electric.

 

 

 

 

 

OWL electric use for the 26 / 07

Graph showing the electric use for 1 day

 

As you can see from this graph the in information starts to make some sense when looking at it.  Of course from midnight till around 08:00 there is not a lot  happening which is to be expected.

From 08:00 onwards you can see that of course we started using up a lot more electric in the house.

The very large spike around 17:00 is of course tea time in the house.  I can’t remember what we had to eat but I do have a funny feeling we did use the oven, boiled the kettle for cups of tea and perhaps various other devices were switched on.

You can also see that once our son goes to bed (around 19:00) there is a bit of a drop before the energy usage starts to rise again.  I can only guess that this is the time we started watching TV, making cups of tea and turning on extra lights around the house.

Although it’s still early in the ‘How to save money at Home’ series the graph is also very similar on the following day so I can already start to see a trend happening in our house.

I’ll be starting in another video soon titled ‘How to Save Money at Home Part 2′ where I will start to look at what I can do around the house to keep the energy use down.

Posted on July 28th, 2011 in Money Saving by JP No Comments

Electric charge points on our motorways

The company Ecotricity is going to be installing electric power points at Welcome Break services on the main motorways between London and Edinburgh.  It will be a bit of a welcome addition for electric car owners as with still having a fairly hopeless rang the electric car was never one for people who need to drive long distances.

The electric car has come a long way since it was first created but really still has a long way to go before the UK will / can adopt the idea as a real solution to petrol / diesel cars.

We are still faced with some big limitations, one being the useless range a electric car has and two the time it takes to fully charge the battery.

As time goes on though the range is starting to get a bit longer with some cars showing a 100+ mile range and the charging time is starting to reduce but until they get to more realistic figures I can’t see the electric car taking off as it should!

I guess the other biggest factor with electric cars is the price… basically they are very expensive with many costing £16,000 (ish) for the basic model which can then rise to … well far to much more!

I would like to have a electric car but with many of my car journeys being 165 miles (from my house to where my holiday caravan is located) having a electric car is just not feasibly.. more so as I also have a 2 year old son and I refuse to wait a couple of hours for the car to charge, he would drive me insane!!

Posted on July 27th, 2011 in Green Cars, Green News by JP No Comments

SolarGorilla review

I’ve had the SolarGorilla now for a few months and I’ve been trying and testing this portable solar panel unit on my travels within the UK.

The device is a nice unit in the build quality and functionality but is totally let down by the fact it does not really work in the UK.  I’ve done a short video talking about my experiences so I hope you enjoy it.

If you have watched the clip above then thank you for watching! I would of liked to said better things about the Solargorilla but I could not get it to work very well.

I will be looking at further products to review so if you do have some suggestions please leave a comment and let me know!

Posted on July 25th, 2011 in Solar Panel Reviews by JP No Comments